The Brewhaha on..."Plan 9 from Outer Space"

“Greetings, my friends.  We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.  And remember, my friends.  Future events such as these will affect you in the future.  […]  My friends, can your hearts withstand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space!”
-Criswell’s opening titles

“We haven’t always fired at them.  For a time we tried to contact them by radio, but no response.  Then they attacked a town.  A small town, I’ll admit, but nevertheless a town of people.  People who died.”
-The general, informing us that people die when they are killed

“Looks like we beat them off again, sir.”
-I’d expect this from aliens, but from a freaking U.S. sergeant?

“You stupid humans!  STUPID, STUPID!!!”
-Rorschach the alien overlord, basically summing up this movie

“The Stark County Treasurer’s Office is a mess!  It is in dire need of structure and guidance!!!”
-Phil Davison, basically summing up this movie

It’s very rare I see a movie so hilarious that it actually starts to physically anger me.  I wanted to lift my 30” TV and chuck it out of my third story window with my bare hands, this is how bad the movie is.

“Plan 9 From Outer Space,” in the same vein as the previously-reviewed “Manos:  The Hands of Fate,” has gone down in cinematic history as one of the worst films of all time.  This is despite the fact that “Plan 9” was created by someone with actual filmmaking experience, and actually appeared to have something of a budget (albeit a meager and very poorly-expensed budget, most likely all spent on Béla Lugosi).

We can start with simple things.  Like the writing.  Which is featured in the movie quotes above, and pretty much speaks for itself.  It’s easy enough to accept stuff like the abysmal staging, setwork, editing, and even acting, because those are the sorts of things that take some real, concrete work, but it’s inconceivable that a sane human being wrote this and expected his cast to follow this script at all.

The opening narration, given to us by a would-be Nostradamus who keeps getting the past and the future mixed up (in the same scene, no less!), basically establishes that this movie has a fairly loose grip on things like logic, or how time works.  His introduction to this warped movie, and his voice-overs throughout, are so hammy that it starts to taste like Christmas all over again.

Then we move into the actual plot, which by all accounts should at least be interesting, if not downright amazing in the hands of competent filmmakers.  People are coming back to life as a result of the advanced technology of aliens, who are seeking to make contact with humans.  It’s zombies (and one relatively hot vampire) created by aliens…

Why?  I dunno.  I think the aliens just felt like it.

Plan 9, as presented in the film, seems to consist of a trio of zombies.  As mentioned above, we have the relatively hot “vampire”-looking chick, as give to us by…“Vampira”?  (Oh, Wikipedia, I thought I could rely on you for stuff like this.)  The late (as of filming) Béla Lugosi and some other guy each double up in the role of Vampira’s deceased better half through the not-so-careful use of edits, and the most not-so-careful use of a cape since Spawn.

Rounding out their trio is Tor Johnson.  Tor Johnson was easy to remember because he gets quite the memorable (first) death scene, and that name kept coming up in the Rifftrax version.  He was also easy to remember by virtue of the sheer number of physical scenes he ended up in.  Just to be clear, though, Tor Johnson is not someone who is built for physical scenes, and is absolutely impossible to take seriously as a result (though his “love tap of death” during the film’s climax, and his overall "deer in headlights" expression, probably don’t help matters much).

Of course, Plan 9 is nothing without its planners, a trio of aliens who end up appearing throughout much of the movie.  All I can really say is that nobody plays an alien like that anymore.  Ever since Sigourney Weaver decided to go all commando on those chest-bursting creatures, you never see aliens that cheesy and bald and out-of-shape anymore.  Specifically, you never see redshirt-sporting aliens from the dreaded “space nipple” moon who can get taken out by Tor Johnson drifting lazily in their general direction.  (Worf might count…)

As my good friend Phil Davison would say, this movie is about as bad as it gets.  The chief conflict is driven by the aliens’ need to prevent humans from discussing a substance which, when detonated, threatens to render sunlight itself explosive and thus destroy the universe.  At first, they try making contact.  When that doesn’t work, they decide to resurrect the dead, claiming that they can finally get our attention that way.  Because the flying saucers hovering over our major cities surely wouldn’t do the job.

Beyond these basic plot problems, the mistakes and shortcomings in this film are numerous and well-documented, from the notorious boom mic featured in the cockpit scenes, to the film’s utter confusion as to whether it’s supposed to be night or day, to the gravestones actually wobbling during the cemetery scenes.  In other words, as far as bad filmmaking goes, Plan 9 is a freaking gold mine.

The Rifftrax version features three of MST3K’s and Rifftrax’s finest in a Nashville theater giving a running commentary on the film.  (And Tor Johnson.  And Béla Lugosi).  If you want to see it for free, you can find it here, or failing that, it will be put up somewhere on the IMDb page.

Note:  The Brewsky is an enthusiastic contributor and movie reviewer who enters people's homes at night to plunder their bedrooms.  But you too can beat him off by joining the Army, the finest military in the world.

The Brewhaha on..."Loser"

Dora:  “I hate Goths, I hate poor people, because they tend to be full of hate themselves.  I hate people with cell phones, like that guy over there.”
Jason Biggs:  “You just hate everything, don’t you?”
Dora:  “Well, not you, not you.  So what do you hate?”
Jason Biggs:  “I…I don’t hate anything.”
-Our couple, in a nutshell

 “ ‘Loser’ is about Paul, a college student of almost surreal niceness, who falls in love with Dora, a college student who persists in the wrong romantic choice almost to the point of perversion.”
-Roger Ebert

“Biggs and Suvari […] make a charming couple, and it's nice to see a youth love story where both participants aren't rich and popular. But Loser is supposed to be a comedy, and only Kinnear's scenes as the pompous prof are good for a giggle; the film's abrupt ending also leaves a less-than-satisfying taste.”
-TheMovieReport.com

“We can’t find the page you requested in this location.  The page may have moved or expired.”
-One of two positive reviews I found on Rotten Tomatoes

Just to be clear, I have never watched “American Pie,” or any of the “American Pie” series of “films.”  I hate Stiffler with a passion, I’m not crazy about that dad who keeps popping up, and Jason Biggs I’m more or less indifferent to.  I’m sure there’s a nice “message” behind those movies, and I’m sure if you look past that it’s actually pretty funny.  I’ve never really been interested in “teen movies” that are simply sitcoms stretched out into two and a half hours of your life, though.  “Oh, look, he just got his jimmy stuck in that pie!  This movie is a classic!  Oh, my, what’s that Stiffler doing to his grandma now?”

In the case of this week (month?)’s movie, though, the alternative is the 2000 film “Loser,” a prospect for a Lifetime Original starring Jason Biggs as…Jason Biggs, the same awkward, doggedly-nice, down-to-earth guy from “American Pie.”  Again, I make this statement assuming he played that sort of character in “American Pie,” having only seen the ending where he tracks down the redhead at band camp to engage in a sword fight to the death passionate teenage kiss with her. 

I also make the above statement upon noticing that the only other guys he hangs out with during the movie are the kind of college douchebags who are as far from “doggedly-nice” and “down-to-earth” as a character in a teen love story can possibly get.  They start by gluing together all of the pages in his textbook (“Do you have any idea how long that took?”) and then just keep snowballing from sitcom rivals into outright Voldemorts.  Within the first thirty or so minutes, I wanted to reach through my TV screen, shoot them, napalm them, and then stick their heads on pikes as a warning to all other college douchebags. 

I remember thinking to myself, “Well, maybe it’ll turn out they’re not so bad.  Maybe it’s just part of a well-intentioned, if gloriously misguided, plan to make Biggs’s character ‘cool,’ or initiate him into a fraternity.  Maybe these college douchebags are just noble sheep in wolf’s clothing along the lines of Severus Snape.”  Nope.  They’re just your run-of-the-mill college douchebags who act like douchebags because, as Alfred once said, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

All of this is done to highlight just how nice Jason Biggs is by comparison.  Except we don’t really need to know that.  We already know he’s a sympathetic character.  Despite the movie’s ever-present attempts to show how much of a klutz he is, we are also shown how good he is with pets and kids, how much work he puts into studying, how caring he is with the lead female.  Everyone else cheats, but he doesn’t.  Everyone else cheats on her and abandons her.  He freaking takes her off the streets and practically nurses her back to health, and then professes his undying love for her.  Compared to this bewildering movie universe of college douchebags, he’s the freaking messiah.

He’s so super-duper special and cosmically, impossibly nice that he freaking gives this sweet girl from the wrong side of the tracks to the only other romantic rival in the movie, the college professor she’s apparently been sleeping with for some time now.   This professor’s sole virtue seems to be that, besides the fact he’s sleeping with a college student, he’s slightly less douchey than the other characters.  He’s also smarter than everyone else, judging by the fact that he’s a senior professor of literature at the ripe old age of thirty-four and he has the female lead falling head over heels for him.

Now, at the end of the day, this probably isn’t the worst movie.  If nothing else, it’s the age-old tale of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, the end.  Modern iterations try to throw in all sorts of twists and turns between “boy meets girl” and “the end,” but the story’s always the same.  The best tales of romance can do away with a lot of those annoying twists and turns and just try to give us a convincing story of what happens when boy meets girl, like with “(500) Days of Summer” or “Juno.”  Or “Shrek.”

The ultimate failing of “Loser” is that it tries to set up its main conflict between the “wrong” and “right” couple while at the same time deflating a lot of the tension before it’s even resolved.  This is probably the failing of many a romance film, where both characters are screaming out a resounding “I love you!” without anyone to calmly answer back, “I know.”

So overall, is “Loser” a good film?  Well, if you like teen movies about total douchebags and completely avoidable love triangles, then by all means, go for it.

Note:  The Brewsky is an enthusiastic contributor and movie reviewer who never calls.  Ever.